Fire Up Your Business Analyst Mindset

Second of five articles drawn from “Turbocharge your Skills and Career with Business Analysis,” presented at Dreamforce 2022.

Adopting a Business Analyst Mindset

Business analysis has become more prominent in the Salesforce ecosystem as custom solutions built on Salesforce become increasingly sophisticated. Many Salesforce customers start customizations with an administrator, then bring on a development team and perhaps an architect to build complex solutions. Often, an architect or admin initially takes on the business analyst role.

The business analyst mindset differs from the admin or architect, who focuses on delivering solutions. Business analysts discover what an organization needs from solutions to improve its processes and offer more value to its customers. They focus more on how solutions will benefit users, customers, and other stakeholders, rather than how the solution works.

A Curious Adventure

Business analysts approach new projects like an adventure. They embark on a hero’s journey through an organization, venturing into unknown domains with allies. They demystify what the org needs, despite resistance.  

Business analysts emerge from the journey with the needs of the stakeholders they met along the way. They analyze the needs and refine them into requirements. Finally, they confirm with the stakeholders that they have all their requirements and understand them well.

Curiosity drives business analysts’ quests, motivating them to learn about the organization, its customers, values, and mission. They want to know how a solution can improve its products, services, or customer relationships.

Mastering the Domains

An organization or program typically has multiple domains. These aren't internet domains or Salesforce MyDomains. Each functional domain encompasses an area of expertise with specific terminology, having one or more specialists fluent in its language. A domain usually contains business processes. Business analysts determine how to improve these processes.

For example, Salesforce sells solutions for the sales, marketing, and service domains. In another case, a major Olympics sponsor ran event hospitality programs with guest registration, ticketing, and housing domains. 

Business analysts typically work in one domain at a time, curious about its vocabulary, experts, and processes. They need to speak the domain’s language to improve its processes.

Orient Toward Benefits

Business analysis orients toward discovering customer benefits. This can pose a challenge for administrators or architects, who focus on how solutions work rather than how they benefit the users. 

When business analysts get a request for something with unknown benefits, they should fire up their curiosity to determine its value to the domain or organization. For example, someone requests a new field, specifying only its name and object. Business analysts should ask, “What objective does it meet?” Or “what value does it provide and to whom?” They ask these questions in the context of a domain objective.

When business analysts get a feature request without self-evident value, they determine the business need through curiosity rather than seeking justification as a gatekeeper.

Aiming for Success

A business analyst mindset starts with a sense of adventure driven by a curiosity about an organization, its domains, and its processes. First, learning about the organization and its values provides a context for discovering what its domains need. Next, business analysts go in-depth with each domain, learning its language and how its processes work. Finally, they join domain experts on a quest to improve the processes.

While on the process improvement quest, business analysts can encounter stakeholders who want specific features. The analysts fire up their curiosity to determine the need behind the stakeholder’s request. For example, what does the feature contribute to meeting a domain objective?

Karl Wiegers, a fifty-year veteran of software development and author of two books on software requirements, says the most important lesson he has learned is:

A usage-centric approach to requirements and design will meet customer needs better than a feature-centric approach.

A usage-centric approach puts user benefits over a solution’s features and functions. These benefits should improve domain processes, adding value to the organization. Understanding the organization’s values at the start of the business analysis adventure clarifies the connection between process improvement and business value.

A business analyst mindset combines curiosity about business needs with a benefits orientation to aim for successful requirements discovery.